Читать книгу Killer Poker Online/2: Advanced Strategies For Crushing The Internet Game - John Vorhaus - Страница 9

THE BLESSING AND THE CURSE

I had a long layover in London’s Heathrow Airport last night. With hours to kill and a laptop computer as my weapon of choice, I went looking for some wireless internet access so I could log on to my UltimateBet account and beguile the time with a little online poker. This being the budding 21st century and not the dark dial-up days of 1999, I had no difficulty finding a hotspot in a pub just off the main departure lounge, nearby Clarke’s Shoes, Boots the Chemist, and Glorious Britain, purveyors of fine English trinkets including plastic bobby helmets at 2 pounds 30 pence each.

Booting up and logging on were a snap, and though the connection was pricey, north of three bobby helmets an hour, I figured to cover the cost with my usual stellar style of online play: selective, aggressive, and viper-quick to exploit the flaws of others. It seemed like a foolproof plan, and would have been but for the inopportune involvement of a certain fool: me. See, I had just flown overnight from Los Angeles, an eleven-hour grind during which I had watched three bad movies, eaten two horrific meals, finished one New York Times crossword puzzle, and slept not at all. Worse, I was now in an English pub, where indulging my taste for British beer seemed like the logical thing to do. “Think globally, drink locally,” right?

Well, it’s a toxic combination, sleep debt and strong ale, and it rendered my normally solid online poker in exactly the sense that one renders fat: removing the meat and muscle and leaving just soft, squishy goo. By the time they called my flight to Rome, I had managed to piss away two weeks’ worth of hard-earned online profit. I hope that mokey23, the main beneficiary of my largess, appreciated the gift.

And that’s internet poker in a nutshell in these budding days of the 21st century: It takes long-term steady play and steely concentration to win any kind of serious coin online, but it takes only a momentary lapse of reason to lose it all back again. The blessing and the curse of online poker is that it’s available to us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, and, increasingly these days, through 360 degrees of global longitude, too. (Comes the day we can log on at 30,000 feet we’ll run the real risk of defunding entire travel budgets before the plane even lands.) With easy, immediate access to the game we love, it’s no wonder we enter play in almost every conceivable state of mind: sleepy, grumpy, dopey, and several other flavors of dwarf.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, I know. If you’ve played even a small amount of internet poker, you’ve no doubt already encountered its common pitfalls. You know what it’s like to seduce yourself into playing the wrong game at the wrong time. You’ve seen your bankroll in catastrophic freefall. You’ve suffered through a string of bad beats so improbable that, logic and common sense notwithstanding, you’ve allowed yourself to believe that the online game is fixed, frozen solid, with the virtual deck stacked against you and you alone. You’ve staggered away from the computer feeling like the victim of alien possession, which alien’s nefarious agenda was to piss away as fast as possible all of your money to mokey23. You have learned, in other words, the fundamental truth of online play, a truth that countless players have learned in the scant years of internet poker’s existence:

IT’S EASIER TO LOSE FAST THAN TO WIN FAST

Why might this be true? For one thing, winning fast relies on the harmonic convergence of many good cards and many bad players, a convergence that’s relatively rare. Losing fast, though, requires only your bad play, and if you’re playing badly, you’re always there, hand after hand after miserable, execrable, disastrous hand. I can think of some other reasons for explosive bankroll decompression, and I’ll list them in a moment, but I’d like you to think of some, too. This book, like all my books, is intended to be interactive. You’ll only get out of it what you put into it, and what I specifically want you to put in is your own original thought, for reading a book is one thing, but participating in it is something altogether else. So I encourage you to embrace the idea of doing the mental exercises presented in these pages. You don’t have to do them all, and you don’t have to do them particularly well. No one will be looking over your shoulder grading your effort. But if you’re determined to get your money’s worth from this book’s cover price of seven bobby helmets (at current rates of exchange), you’ll make the effort not just to read the thing, but to engage it, involve yourself in it, make it your own. That’s how one’s practice of poker grows.

So let’s think together, shall we, about why and how we find it easy to lose fast online. Here are some ways my bankroll bleeds:

I play when I’m tired, when my judgment is soft. I play angry, or keep playing when I’ve been made angry. I distract myself with television, telephone or radio. I play in tough environments like pubs in British airports. I play in games too big for my bankroll. I play too many games at once. I play when I just don’t care. Once I played in a post-operative, Vicodin-addled haze, and man was that a crash-and-burn.

And now here are some ways yours does:

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You’ll note that I’ve left you some jotting space on the pages, and any time you see the >> symbol, it means your thoughts here. Or you can keep a notebook, or open a computer file. It really doesn’t matter how you record your thoughts, so long as you do record your thoughts. As I said, that’s how the practice of poker grows.

And it’s growing your practice of poker that really interests me. Whether you play online for fun or for profit, you naturally want to do the best you can. You naturally want to improve. So it’s reasonable to set the goal of improvement over even the goal of winning. Presumably if improvement happens, winning will follow. Of course, improvement requires tools, techniques, strategy, tactics, and deep understanding…all of which I confidently hope to bring you in this book. But improvement also requires the right state of mind: a state of mind that acknowledges setbacks and takes them in stride, that recognizes errors and moves to correct them and that notes without rancor past pitfalls and determines to avoid them in the future.

This is not just a matter of saying, “I will play poker with discipline.” It’s fine to be disciplined—necessary, in fact—but discipline only squelches the urge, it doesn’t address the underlying cause. You might have the willpower to not smoke a cigarette all day, all week, or all month, but until you’ve actually quit smoking, you haven’t changed your state of mind. I might be “disciplined” enough not to play poker next time I’m killing time in Heathrow (or I might not) but until I confront my underlying cockiness, all I have is a fundamentally flawed state of mind that says, I can beat this game anywhere, any time, even at Heathrow, even under the influence of sleep debt and strong ale. From that p(o)int forward, it doesn’t matter if I play specific hands with discipline or not. I’ve already made the mistake of indiscipline, and disaster is the predictable result.

The right state of mind for an online poker player, then, is attentive humility. Being attentive means simply bringing all of your concentration and focus to bear when you settle in for an online session. Humility means never imagining that you’ve got the game licked. You haven’t. I haven’t. The top pros haven’t. Nobody has. All any of us can do is strive to keep closing the gap between the players we are and the players we want to be. And that’s the “blessing” part of internet poker’s blessing-and-curse construction. While it’s possible to lose fast, it’s also possible to learn fast—faster than previous generations of poker players could ever have imagined. There are so many different sites offering so many different games, structures, limits, satellites, and tournaments (and speeds—regular, turbo, even ultra turbo) that excellence in poker is an achievable goal for he or she who has a mind to put his or her mind to it.

While I’m stumbling through this thicket of awkward pronouns, let me take a moment to address the issue of awkward pronouns. In a perfect world, there would be a gender-neutral third person singular pronoun that we could use instead of his/her, he/she, or they. So far, this gift of language has not been bestowed upon English, nor is it likely to crop up between now and when I finish this book. Should I then use a stilted construction, nod to political correctness and use she, or bow to convenience and use he?

I’m gonna go with convenience. Though women are entering poker in record numbers (and, from Annie Duke and Jennifer Harmon to anonymous distaff winners of cash games and tournaments worldwide, proving themselves capable of waxing any man’s keister), the fact yet remains that the vast majority of poker players, both online and in the realworld realm, are male. It’s changing, but it has a long way to go. With that in mind, then, I’m going to use he as the default personal pronoun in this book, and take it as given that, whether you pee standing up or sitting down, you’ll cut me some slack.

Further to the subject of cutting slack, I hope you won’t mind if you find in this text one or two things borrowed from my earlier Killer Poker books. If this is your first visit to Killer Poker Land, I urge you to spend some time in your local bookstore skimming some of the other titles and bringing yourself up to speed, for much of what we talk about here will be based on, and built from, much of what we talked about there. Or skip all that and just absorb the core Killer Poker philosophy, “Go big or go home.” In any case, there’s bound to be a certain amount of repetition, and that’s by design. It’s not that I can’t count on you to remember having read it, or that I can’t count on me to remember having written it. It’s just that some points bear repeating, and I won’t be shy about repeating them as necessary.

One big difference between those books and this: the form of poker under consideration here is exclusively no limit Texas hold’em. Since I wrote the first Killer Poker book (or even since I wrote the last one), no limit hold’em (NLHE) has taken over, both online and in the realworld. Other types of poker endure, for sure, but NLHE is the 800-pound gorilla in poker’s living room right now. You can’t ignore it and you can’t avoid it, so you might as well invite it to sit on the sofa and offer it a banana. The situations I will speak to in this book, then, are those of NLHE. If you favor Omaha, seven-card stud, or one-up, two-up high-low strawberry, I hope you can extract some relevance from my examples. If not, what can I say? I know that most of you play no limit hold’em, so no limit hold’em is what we’ll discuss.

Per this discussion, consider the wannabe rounder living in North Platte or South Bend, circa 1996. Apart from his (or her; okay, his) home games, he might only get to play real poker against real foes a couple of times a year, during infrequent forays to Las Vegas or distant riverboats, there to cram in as many hours of poker as his brief stints allow. In the name of improving his play, he could very well have it in mind to investigate different approaches to playing a hold’em hand like K-Q suited under the gun (UTG). Trouble is, he may encounter that hand only once or twice during his stay; a mere handful of times during his whole poker playing year. It’s tough to go to school on a subject when meaningful lessons are so few and far between.

Now fast forward ten years to the brave new world of internet poker, where if you want to put in twenty or thirty hours at the table, you need only unplug the phone and lay in a healthy supply of Red Bull. Given the accelerated pace of play online, with hands coming at you fast and furious (2x fast and 2x furious if you’re playing more than one game at a time) it’s reasonable to expect to see that same UTG K-Q suited a couple of times an hour, giving you ample opportunity to analyze and strategize, refining your approach to playing that hand while your last experience of it is still fresh in your mind.

The impact of this supercharged learning curve cannot be understated. From internet qualifier Chris Moneymaker’s win at the main event of the 2003 World Series of Poker forward, we have seen poker players weaned on internet play crossing over to triumph in large tournaments and live cash games. Why do you suppose this is? What advantages do you imagine an internet player has over someone who has only played in realworld games?

>>

Here’s one I can think of: An internet player, accustomed as he is to the blistering pace of online play, may find live games to be luxuriously slow. Relative to what he’s used to, live play offers ample time to analyze situations, weigh factors, and come to conclusions. Adjusting to the brick-and-mortar (b&m) realm, he actually gears down to a much slower speed, not unlike a runner who has trained with ankle weights but removes them before a big race. Nor do individual decisions vex him, for he has practiced making poker choices by the thousands or tens of thousands in the privacy of his own home (or office when the boss wasn’t looking) for the last seventeen months straight, for hours at a time. He has seen a lifetime’s worth of hands and crammed a lifetime’s worth of learning into his short poker sojourn.

Here’s another edge I can think of: We outnumber them. Five years ago, the internet player in a realworld tournament was an oddity, a rarity. Leather-assed cardroom veterans viewed us as dead money, test tube babies with no clue and no chance. Moneymaker alone did not change all that. He just waved the flag of the future. Now, every realworld poker tournament, large or small, features a field filled with savvy and schooled internet players. Some tournaments, like the Party Poker Million and UltimateBet’s Ultimate Poker Classic in Aruba, were created specifically to give online players a realworld target, if you will, to shoot for. Online players have crossed over to b&m cash play in force as well, and while the snide old guard may still regard us individually as dead money, collectively we define the field. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you want victory in realworld poker these days, you’re gonna have to go through internet players to get it.

Of course, the internet player does not have every edge. Many online players making the transition to realworld play have no experience in picking off tells, for instance, or guarding against giving off their own. You can often recognize an internet player in a b&m game by the fact of his folding (or tipping his intention to fold) before the action gets to him. He’s used to clicking the fold in turn button on his computer, and not aware of the need to wait to act. Internet players can also be quite impatient. Used to playing a souped-up version of the game, they can find the practical considerations of realworld play—the pushing of pots, the shuffling of cards—make b&m games annoyingly, even agonizingly, slow. Impatience, of course, can lead to the loosening of starting standards and other reckless adventures. Can you think of additional ways that internet players cede advantage in a realworld game?

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In any event, the distinction between internet player and b&m player is getting fuzzier and fuzzier with each passing day. Just a few years ago, online players occupied a sort of ghetto; you felt sorry for them because they didn’t live in a place where cardroom poker was available and they had to make do with that sorry substitute, the online game. Many—most?—realworld players had at the same time a certain hidebound resistance to online play. It wasn’t the game they grew up with, and they viewed it with disdain. They couldn’t imagine sitting down to a computer screen if b&m games were available to them. Today’s serious poker player has no such prejudice. He knows that online poker is no less “real” than realworld poker and considers it his mission to master both. He has learned what those in the vanguard knew to be true from the start: Online poker is no better nor worse than realworld play; it’s just different, that’s all.

It’s odd to think of “a few years ago” as ancient history, yet, in the swiftly evolving world of internet poker, that’s exactly what it is. A few years ago, you could count the number of viable internet poker sites on one hand. Now, you can’t even keep track; new sites spring up every day. (Naming online poker sites is a growth industry; so far as I know, shoemoney tonight.org, floptopset.net, and pokerbeatsworking.com remain unclaimed.) Not only has online poker evolved but also a whole support industry has sprung into being, with data mining “sniffer” programs like Poker Tracker, online poker news and strategy sites, poker schools, discussion boards, blogs, bulletin boards and forums, ad nauseum. Furthermore, online sites have become a mainstay of realworld tournaments, funneling players by the hundreds or thousands to such prestigious televised tournaments as the World Series of Poker and those of the World Poker Tour.

It’s worth talking about television for a minute, for if internet poker is a forge for new players, then televised poker is the fuel that fires it. Thanks to the invention of the lipstick cam, allowing us at last to see what all those lying liars actually hold, poker on television has gone from the functional equivalent of watching snow melt to some of the most compelling reality TV on the air today. In turn, the ready availability of internet poker means that anyone who watches Pro Poker Throwdown or whatever can instantly scratch the inevitable itch to play.

The fact that “ordinary guys” are winning on TV merely enhances the appeal of televised poker and in fact creates a delicious vicious circle. People see people winning millions in televised tournaments. They’re inspired to play online; they do so, and some of them satellite their way into the televised tournaments. There, their sheer weight of numbers ensures another win, or at least a high finish, for another average Joe. People see said Joe bringing home the cheese, and the cycle begins again.

In the meantime, the internet poker player base continues to expand, and those who have been around for a while—or those who learn fast—continue to profit. This, too, goes against the conventional wisdom of, say, 2002, when it was glibly predicted that anyone who wanted to make money playing internet poker had sure as hell better do it fast before all the fish were caught, skinned, filleted, pan fried, and digested with a greedy and self-satisfied burp. Now we know otherwise. Sure, losing players go broke and quit online poker every day. They hazard 100 or 200 bucks, and when their bankroll’s gone they decide that their time is better spent on other leisure activities like philately or quoits. But others come along to take their place, and this will continue so long as televised poker—poker porn, if you will—keeps whipping newbies into a frenzy of poker excitement.

Sure, the bubble may burst. Governments might crack down. Global economies could collapse, and leave none of us with two virtual nickels to rub together. The polar icecaps might melt and flood us all. Certainly the media, with its notoriously short attention span, will eventually turn its shining spotlight elsewhere. But even when that happens, we’ll still have a poker playing population that has increased geometrically in recent years. The waters will continue to teem with fish.

Does this mean that internet poker is an ongoing gold rush? Of that I’m not so sure. Undoubtedly, hundreds or thousands of players have won hundreds or thousands of dollars playing poker on the internet. Have they held onto their winnings? They’ll tell you they have, but you can’t necessarily trust their assertions, for poker players, like all bettors, may suffer from gamnesia, the tendency to forget last week’s losses and remember only the wins. Plus, as we know, it’s easier to lose fast than to win fast online. Many is the healthy bankroll that has suddenly suffered and died.

Worse, as many successful online poker players have discovered, it’s a challenge to move money out of the virtual realm and into our realworld wallets. I’m not talking about the mechanics of moving money around; that problem has long since been solved. Nor am I talking about shady sites bogarting your dough, though that has happened and can happen, and it pays to play only at sites you trust. Rather, I’m talking about the need to maintain a large bankroll to keep generating large profit. Cut significantly into your bankroll (to pay the rent, say) and you have to drop down to lower levels, and potentially less profitable games, to protect your bankroll from a big negative swing that could kill it.

So there is, I think, a certain mythos surrounding internet poker. Many people see it as an opportunity to Get Rich Quick in Your Bathrobe. While some have, most don’t. As with any gold rush, it’s the efforts of the many that fund the fortunes of the few. Will this book make you one of the few? I wish I could say for sure that it will, but that would neither be truthful nor, I think, doing you a service. After all, it’s in the nature of the few to be, well, few. While diligent and dedicated players are not in short supply online, even the diligent and dedicated may lack the smarts, confidence, drive, talent, time, discipline, home life, mindset, and skill set to win big online.

Plus, you could always get unlucky.

Thus, we have internet poker as it presents itself to us in the budding days of the 21st century. It’s not the money tree that many of us hoped it would be. It’s not the road to ruin that many of us (or maybe many of our spouses, pets, or clergy) feared it would be. At the end of the day, it’s “a powerful force that can only be used for good or for evil.” How we use it has always been, and continues to be, pretty much up to us.

Sigh.

I shoulda bought the bobby helmets instead.

Rome, March 2005